Small acts can define a U.S. president, including Trump
A president is judged on big questions: making war, managing prosperity, advancing equality, promoting unity. These are the tests of leadership.
A president is also known for other things, too, many of them symbolic. They are small acts of empathy, imagination and compassion that challenge conventional wisdom as only a president can. It may be a program, an initiative, a gesture, a grace note.
It was Theodore Roosevelt inviting Frederick Douglass, the celebrated “negro” author, to dinner at the White House. And Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's ensuring Marian Anderson could sing at the Lincoln Memorial when she was refused by Constitution Hall.
It was FDR establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps and Harry Truman integrating the armed forces. It was John F. Kennedy establishing the Peace Corps and creating the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
It was Lyndon Johnson “keeping America beautiful.” It was George W. Bush fighting AIDS in Africa, and Barack Obama embracing gay marriage.
Sometimes it is a president issuing an executive order. Often, though, it is presidents acting out of personal conviction.
And what of Donald Trump? He will say he has cut corporate taxes, eliminated environmental regulation and remade the U.S. Supreme Court with three conservative justices. All true. But how did he use his moral authority and his personal influence? What lesser things will he be remembered for?
He increased and stabilized funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, redesigned the White House Rose Garden, and proposed the “U.S. Space Force.” But he also gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to
Rush Limbaugh, a bigot. He issued pardons to cronies, grifters and sycophants.
Rather than protecting more public land from development and creating more national monuments, he rescinded and narrowed existing ones.
This week, his administration offered leases to oil and gas companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. It's yet another rebuke of his predecessor and conservationists.
Much of what a president does goes unnoticed; few know or care. Certainly, Trump's regime of vulgarity, profanity and hostility didn't bother the millions who voted for him.
But little things matter. One is Trump's plans to change the colours on the fuselage of Air Force One, the president's legendary airplane. When the new model is delivered a few years from now, it is to be red, white and blue.
Trump wanted to make the president's plane look more “patriotic.” Or, more likely, to resemble his own plane, a garish Taj Mahal.
Of all the things the man could do, you might say, this is pretty inoffensive. Except that toying with tradition without reason matters.
The striking façade of Air Force One was created in 1961 by Kennedy. It was inspired by Raymond Loewy, the foremost industrial designer of his day.
“I was unimpressed by the gaudy red exterior markings and amateurish graphics of Air Force One,” Loewy remembered when Kennedy showed him the design of a new Boeing 707 then under construction. Loewy proposed a dazzling three-colour motif: white, a traditional slate blue and cion yellow, embracing the future.
He reduced the Air Force markings and replaced the red writing with “a luminous ultramarine blue.” He echoed the type on the nation's founding documents.
Since 1962, that has been the look of Air Force One, even as the model and nature of the plane itself has changed. Kennedy's plane, which returned his body from Dallas in 1963, was retired in 1998.
It sits today behind a security cordon in a Second World War hangar on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, outside Dayton, Ohio. It is eerie in the refracted light. It has presence.
The point of its design was to make a statement about the office and the country on runways at home and abroad — and it did. Every president since Kennedy has used it proudly.
On a whim, out of ego, Donald Trump has decided to change Air Force One. Joe Biden will reverse his cartoonish impulse, like so much of this graceless presidency.